Speaking of mad worlds, any of you following the saga of Kenneth Lay and the Lincoln Bedroom? It's kinda interesting as an example of how inept (not biased; inept) the press can be and how phony reports seem to live forever.
You can read the whole saga over at www.spinsanity.com, though some of the
better episodes may require that subscription to Salon I've been recommending. I especially love the parts where a newspaper prints the story, retracts the story and then one of their columnists repeats it. The Washington Times printed the story, retracted it, printed it again, then retracted it again…and the day after the second retraction, radio newsman Paul Harvey broadcast it, citing that newspaper as his source! (The Times, of course, got it from The Chicago Tribune, which had long since retracted it.)
This kind of thing is probably more common than we believe, especially since so many erroneous reports aren't as cleanly disprovable as this one. And I guess what really rankles is that, in the age of the Internet and services like Nexis, this kind of thing ought to be extinct. I can sit here, well outside the news biz and — employing only a free search engine — find multiple corrections and retractions of the story in less than thirty seconds. Apparently, folks at papers like The Washington Times are not even bothering to search on their own web sites. In this electronic age, there's no excuse for this…not that there ever was one.